(To The Best Of Our Knowledge)
The Secret Language of Trees
Category: Wellness
This is the ‘last generation’ that can save nature, WWF says
The proportion of the planet’s land that is free from human impact is projected to drop from a quarter to a tenth by 2050, as habitat removal, hunting, pollution, disease and climate change continue to spread, the organization added.The group has called for an international treaty, modeled on the Paris climate agreement, to be drafted to protect wildlife and reverse human impacts on nature.It warned that current efforts to protect the natural world are not keeping up with the speed of manmade destruction.The crisis is “unprecedented in its speed, in its scale and because it is single-handed,” said Marco Lambertini, the WWF’s director general. “It’s mindblowing. … We’re talking about 40 years. It’s not even a blink of an eye compared to the history of life on Earth.”“Now that we have the power to control and even damage nature, we continue to (use) it as if we were the hunters and gatherers of 20,000 years ago, with the technology of the 21st century,” he added. “We’re still taking nature for granted, and it has to stop.”
Plastics have entered the human food chain.
PARIS: Bits of plastic have been detected in the faeces of people in Europe, Russia and Japan, according to research claiming to show for the first time the widespread presence of plastics in the human food chain.
All eight volunteers in a small pilot study were found to have passed several types of plastic, with an average of 20 micro-particles per 10g of stool, researchers reported Tuesday at a gastroenterology congress in Vienna.
The scientists speculated that the tiny specks – ranging in size from 50 to 500 micrometres – may been ingested via seafood, food wrapping, dust or plastic bottles.
Read more at https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/world/plastics-enter-human-food-chain-study-microplastics-10856832
The Food We Eat
Hopkins researchers recommend reclassifying psilocybin, the drug in ‘magic’ mushrooms, from schedule I to schedule IV
Although psilocybin is relatively less harmful than other drugs and not prone to compulsive abuse, the researchers don’t recommend releasing psilocybin into patients’ hands even with a prescription. “We believe that the conditions should be tightly controlled and that when taken for a clinical reason, it should be administered in a health care setting, monitored by a person trained for that situation,” says Johnson. The researchers foresee that the process for psilocybin use in the clinic would be similar to how an anesthesiologist prescribes and administers a drug, minimizing the potential for abuse or harm.
Well apparently people have been doing this wrong for 10,000 years and now it needs to be handed over to “pharmaceutical professionals.”
Is fasting the fountain of youth?
So far, research has revealed promising results. One study published last year divided 100 people, all free of disease, into two groups. For three months, participants either ate whatever they wanted, or consumed between 800 and 1,100 calories for only five days out of the month — a pattern researchers refer to as a “fasting mimicking diet” or “FMD.” At the end of the study period, participants on the FMD who were at risk for disease saw their fasting glucose, an indicator of diabetes risk, return to normal. Markers for heart disease, along with high levels of cholesterol and triglycerides, decreased, as did levels of the 1GF1 marker of various cancers. Additionally, participants lost abdominal fat, while preserving lean muscle mass and metabolism, which is often sacrificed on a lower calorie diet.
As someone how is notorious for forgetting to eat this all sounds good to me.
Every Adult Should Have a Bedtime
Not only is a regular bedtime just about the most enjoyable habit available to us living things, but it is extremely good for us. Surveying a group of nearly 2,000 “healthy” sleepers (i.e. no diagnosed sleep disorders) between the ages of 45 and 84, researchers from the Duke University Medical Center found that adults who experience insufficient sleep duration, interrupted sleep cycles, and irregular bed- and waking-times face increased cardiometabolic risk, which refers to the risk for health issues like cardiovascular disease, greater obesity, hypertension, and diabetes.
I am SO not at risk of any of these things. I just know my productiviy goes down after midnight and my desier to stay up for no good reason increases. Staying up usually wins. I am a marathon sleeper. I am super good at sleeping, once I get there. I just wish I could start it earlier. This is probably never going to happen. But don’t let me set a bad example.
Rewilding the American Child
Children are much more likely to enjoy outdoor activities—and stick with them—if they start out at the right moment in their physical and cognitive development.
This months Outside contains more than a dozen articles about”Rewilding the American Child” but that is not what this site is about. It’s about cataloging and sharing good resources. It’s definitely not about click bate. I have not read through all of these articles yet. As I do I will be adding links below. My addition of a link only means I have read it and it has something to offer to my larger project. ALL of the articles are available here.
If you want to save the world, veganism isn’t the answer
Veganism has rocketed in the UK over the past couple of years – from an estimated half a million people in 2016 to more than 3.5 million – 5% of our population – today. Influential documentaries such as Cowspiracy and What the Health have thrown a spotlight on the intensive meat and dairy industry, exposing the impacts on animal and human health and the wider environment.
But calls for us all to switch entirely to plant-based foods ignore one of the most powerful tools we have to mitigate these ills: grazing and browsing animals.
Rather than being seduced by exhortations to eat more products made from industrially grown soya, maize and grains, we should be encouraging sustainable forms of meat and dairy production based on traditional rotational systems, permanent pasture and conservation grazing. We should, at the very least, question the ethics of driving up demand for crops that require high inputs of fertiliser, fungicides, pesticides and herbicides, while demonising sustainable forms of livestock farming that can restore soils and biodiversity, and sequester carbon.
Honestly, she had me at cheese. Man oh man, I love cheese. Behold the power of cheese.
Finding silence online is difficult, but the pursuit is worthwhile
What silence looks like online is hard to describe, because it’s necessarily individual: I have a different threshold than you, for example, for dealing with Twitter trolls or rogue Instagram commenters. But I do think there are a few rules. First, quiet is found in considered spaces — think @everycolorbot or #cloudtwitter. Second, if silence is found through listening, then peaceful places online are more generative (like Glitch or Codecademy, or one of my favorites, Twine) and, generally, focused on maintaining small, healthy communities (like Metafilter). Silence pools like the tides. It’s hard to find at high tide, and immediately obvious where the pools are when the tide are out.
True silence online can only be found at Zombocom
Dean’s List 